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The ultimate goal of most publishers is likely to be pay-per-read. In other words, royalties for the PUBLISHER. The author might recieve 0.00000001% of this, or something like that, if they are lucky.

The publishers are out of luck if they want to kill an author's percentage.

For most, it's contractually set at a certain rate (whole percantage points of the gross sale), and the publisher making MORE money only means more money for the author.

Last numbers I heard had an author's royalties at somewhere between 1% and 5%. And the big names--those that bring in the massive ammounts of sales that keep publishers in busienss--certainly won't sell their already-done-and-anyone-can-print-it books for less than this.

free_culture [randomfoo.net] Lawrence Lessig. <free culture>. Intro. Over the past three years, Lessig
has given more than 100 talks like the one captured here....randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/ - 7k - Cached [216.239.51.100]

The Limits of Copyright [thestandard.com] ... it an offense to write code to interfere with this use-controlling code, regardless
of whether the use would be considered fair under the copyrightlaw....www.thestandard.com/article/display/ 0,1151,16071,00.html - 34k - Dec. 12, 2002 - Cached [216.239.51.100] - [slashdot.org]

High court weighs copyrightlaw - Tech News - CNET.com [com.com] ...Lessig and his allies are hoping not merely to overturn this law, however, but
to build momentum for an all-out legal assault on many recent copyright...news.com.com/2100-1023-961467.html - 28k - Cached [216.239.51.100] - [slashdot.org]

This story, which you all really should have read by now, depicts a world of copyright/DRM/Etc. laws to the extreme:
The Right to Read
[gnu.org]
The scariest line definitely comes after: most of the specific laws and practices described above have already been proposed

Everyone always bitches about the big companies saying the authors or artists get nothing so it's ok to steal from them anyways! If you buy a book, and the author gets $0.05 for each book sold, or you steal a book(Gnutella, etc) they get nothing! So the big boys take most of the money? That's a completely different problem from everyone else literally stealing from the authors!(Hey a pun! Where'd that come from?). So quit bitching about the RIAA taking all of the money or the publishers taking all of the money. Publishers generally actually pay pretty well, compare it to self-publishing and you'll see _why_ publishers take alot of the money. I know, this is off-topic because I agree completely with Lessig about copyright law, but I'm sick and tired of people bashing the big boys and saying the little guys get only 0.00000001% of anything, that's still something and if no one buys the book, they get 0.0000000000% and that's 100% less! So go out there and buy some god-damned books and CDs. We all do piracy, I'm sure, to an extent, but doing it because the authors/artists would otherwise get almost nothing is not better than them simply getting nothing! Quit changing the topic to allow yourself to pirate.

Don't mod me down because you disagree with me, mod me up and maybe get people to say something insightful.

books in the Public Domain that have been hijacked by Disney, and are aggressively defended by them.

The Walt Disney Company does not own the rights to the novel Pinocchio or to the name "Pinocchio". DisneyCo owns only the copyright on its film adaptation[1], including the likenesses of the characters as drawn by Disney animators, and has no grounds to prevent other publishers' film adaptations of the original novel [dvdplanet.com]. DisneyCo most definitely does not own the rights to "Noddy", a character created by Enid Blyton that may have been inspired by Pinocchio.

The Jungle Book - Kipling

Which exemplifies . No less than one year after The Jungle Book went PD in a major market, DisneyCo published a film adaptation. The company was obviously waiting for the copyright to run out. Now DisneyCo has closed the door behind itself by pushing copyright term extensions [pineight.com] through Congress.

Peter Pan

NOT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN WORLDWIDE! The European Union recognizes a monopoly on literary works for the life of the last surviving author, plus the remainder of the calendar year, plus 70 years. Because J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, died in 1937, copyright in Peter Pan does not expire in the European Union until 2007, and DisneyCo has to pay GOSH a royalty for every Peter Pan and Return to Never Land disc sold in the EU. In fact, the United Kingdom has granted a statutory perpetual copyright [hmso.gov.uk] on the work, with royalties going to a children's hospital [gosh.org].

[1] DisneyCo may lose even that if the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft happens to strike down the 1976 extension along with the Bono Act.

The LA Public Library [lapl.org] has something called "Project Bestseller". If you don't want to wait forever for a copy of a currently bestselling book to become available (I waited 4 months for "Shelters of Stone" -- what a waste), you can check out books from the PB shelf. These books are actually rented at $0.15 per day. They are also available to borrow for free, but you generally have to wait for them.

Sorry but I do not agree to this.
By doing this, you are creating a new right, a new business model whereby Libraries, which do not currently pay anything beyond the initial purchase price for the book, now have to pay the equivalent to a licensing fee for the books it owns. This is a rotten deal, because even if at the beginning it is 1/10, it will eventually go up to 1/1.
If we combine this with the forever extended copyright, then we have the equivalent of Stallman's short story. I'd rather have libraries pay full price on initial purchase so that everyone can read for free forever.